I'm almost ready to retire the current version of my website, one of my favorite site designs to date. PINC.US V7 is in the works and should be up by the end of September. The new site will feature full bleed images and a better project index as well as a bunch of incremental improvements.

I just finished the site design for Bureau V. Its sort of a modulating atmosphere based mostly on the work I was doing earlier on interactive atmospherics. Using random color sets and blurs, cloud formations fade in and out of existence. Each time the site opens a new organization appears and can be regenerated endlessly by pressing the space bar. I’ve also set it up so that the user can modify the design, either by dragging the orbs around or by deleting them by pressing shift and clicking on them. There’s no content yet, that’s the next step.

I finally got permission from Asymptote to publish some images of the haptic interfaces I designed for Volkswagen. These images have been laying dormant on my site for over a year, so you can either scroll back or just click here to have a look.

Looking through my old files I came across this early version of my last website. It is missing all of the content, but it shows the performance pretty well. I was trying to make a site that could constantly redesign itself based on certain parameters. The hexagon, which is wildly overused these days, seemed like a nice way to add a geometrical component into a random organization algorithm. There are a lot of subtle features built in that make the interface rather sophisticated. If you scroll over the hexagons they scale in proximity to the mouse. Clicking a hexagon causes the colors of every other hexagon to fade into a randomly selected new color. The buttons on the darker hexagon eventually became the navigation system for the whole site, but for now they just regenerate the system (you can also do this by pressing space). My friend Alex Mollere who is getting his Phd. in Mathematics figured out that there are approximately 36,000,000,000,000,000 possible graphic layouts for this site not including shifts in color.

These screenshots show variations of the original version of this website. The idea was to produce a site that constantly designed itself. Based on geometric relationships, randomization, and automated color selection, it produced billions of unique layouts, allowing chance to play a greater part in the design process.

ippThis is a little something I’m experimenting with based on techniques I learned from Joshua Davis. Its a sort of controlled random field of glow. To make a new organization press the space bar. To move an orb just drag. To delete an orb hold down shift and click. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this yet, but the effect is something I’ve been after for a while.